Charania Takes Home EPT Grand Final Championship

Monday, April 30th, 2012 by Ryan

The 2012 PokerStars European Poker Tour Grand Final is officially in the books, and it was taken down by an American player by the name of Mohsin Charania when all was said and done. The heads up match was between him and Lucille Cailly, who is from France. The second place finish by Cailly is the best finish by any woman to ever play in this event as well. When the action was down to heads up all the chips were in the middle, and we essentially had a hand that could really go any way. Charania had pocket Queens, and was up against the A-K of Cailly. Of course, Charania’s queens held up, and he became the champ.

The two made a deal before heads up play began though where Charania got €1.15 million, and Cailly got €1.05 million, which left €200,000 left for the eventual winner, as well as the title of champion. Charania had some big cashes in the past, but didn’t have that big time live tournament win until this point. You could tell by how he was talking after the tournament that he was frustrated by not getting that big title, but was incredibly satisfied and happy to take it down this time. As far as Cailly win, this was the largest score of her career, and while she had to be disappointed to not take down the title, she was still happy with the huge profit she took.

Charania travels around the live tournament circuit with quite a few other well known players in Faraz Jaka and Athanasios Polychronopoulos. He’ll be taking part in some other large tournaments such as the Italian Poker Tour Grand Final in San Remo, and also the always popular PokerStars SCOOP. From there he plans to head to Las Vegas to play in the 2012 World Series of Poker and the 60+ events that will be featured there.

As far as the other players who were at the final table, it was Daniel “Garnerus” Gomez, who is a well-known online poker player that finished in eighth place. Seventh place went to Clayton Mozdzen who lost with A-10 against the A-Q of Cailly, and he was followed to the door by Michael Dietrich, who has over $4.1 million in live tournament winnings, and he finished this one in sixth place with a pay day of €245,000 when his A-9 ran into the A-K of the eventual champion. This left us with five players but another online player from PokerStars in Rodrigo Caprioli was sent home next in fifth. Caprioli’s situation was interesting because he bought into this event with VPPs from PokerStars, so was essentially taking home all profit with his €315,000 score. The final two players to go before we got to the final two were Sergio Castelluccio in fourth place, and Bernard Guigon in third place.

As you can tell, the final table was filled with some online poker superstars, so Charania had his work cut out for him for sure. He was able to continue his strong play though and outlast the field to take down the huge win at the end of the day.